1 - Trolls, trolls, trolls!

[Music] Landing your first job after college is not always easy. You realize that your campus was an incubator, and most of the things you learned in school are theories. And what you know about the industry are actually based on second-hand experience passed on to you by your professors. But the biggest takeaway of every fresh grad is this. It is so damn hard to find a job. [Music] So, at that time, when I was a job hunting, of course, that is correct. I have submitted several applications. It just so happens that this is one of the early ones to get back to me with Alphina and we will call you back for an interview. So, of course, I would take advantage. This is Danny. It's not his real name and we're doing this to protect him. Danny had just graduated from a prestigious school in the Philippines. He majored in journalism. He was unemployed for a couple of months. And so when he heard back from this one public relations sperm, it was a score. The pay was good. He passed the interview. Everything was going well. Save for one thing. He didn't know exactly what he was going to do, or whom he was going to work for. And so I said, "Okay, see here. It's part of the activity process." I be okay, understand. The engagement or the work was being presented to me. That it was on the monthly basis. And I said, "Okay, look at an engagement." Or an agency's corporate PR or what. A package for a politician. It was 2015 and aspiring politicians were just about to file their certificate of candidacy for the 2016 national and local elections. But that early, they were already planning the campaign and they had a sense of what they wanted to do. Social media was the name of the game. It was relatively new, but it had the potential to reach millions. I only realized it during the latter part of the work of the engagement time. The firm keep or maintain several profiles on Facebook. And they are implementing or taking advantage of ways to circumvent Facebook's fair use policy. But at that time, since I was fresh gadget, I was a podium. I didn't really have the power or energy to see or speak against or speak ill. I just realized it one day, but there's something going on. It doesn't feel right. And this is where our story begins. Hello, I'm Jonathan Ong, this information researcher and professor at UMass Amherst and Harvard University. And I'm Kat Ventura, a journalist and executive producer at NOAA Podcast. And in this podcast, we take you deep into the shadowy world of political campaigns, paid trolls and disinformation networks, focused in the Philippines. This has catch me if you can, powered by Pooha Podcast. In this series, Kat and I invite you to tag along with us when we interview former and even current political operators and paid trolls and listed for campaigns. We will hear how exactly they landed their jobs. What skills and personal qualities they possess that get them through this kind of work will also raise questions about ethics and get our guests to reflect on their experience. Yes, and this is episode one, Jonathan. Aren't you excited? I'm super excited. Thanks for being part of this journey with me, Kat. Right, and the reason why we're doing this, because there is a lot of misconceptions about who and what trolls are. I think up to this point, until I started this conversation with Jonathan, I always imagined them to be like in call centers. But the parity, that's not always the case. In some cases, in most cases, they operate within PR firms, advertising firms, digital agencies. And there's a certain level of prestige even to these kinds of jobs. Obviously, some of these kinds of work would be open secrets. But of course, you need a secret, right? Because if you know who you are, your politicians working with specific PR firms, that we associate with certain corporate brands. What's going to happen is we're going to take you to the different years and we're also going to be interviewing people who have experience working in these troll firms. And in this first episode, we actually got a troll. Talk about their experience. Again, we mentioned Danny at the start, but that's not his real name. This is actually a former troll, someone who had worked in the 2016 elections. And if you recall, that was a momentous election and a momentous year as well for social media and democracy. And we talk about how fake news, troll farms, troll armies, became part of our lexicon, became part of our vocabulary only in 2016. And attribution of social media really influenced the vote. So we'll go a little bit behind that. But more crucially, here from an operator himself. I think it was the PR firm themselves. At first, it was a relatively conditionally. So they have already part of mastered maintaining relations, or the other nations with the press. When I say the press, meaning TV, Broadsheet, you know, in the radio. You know, the triangle gap. For them, social media was an add-on. However, there was a shift in the attitude run onto the election day. It's the research period. That this was at a time that you know, Facebook, because there's a bit of proliferation on the use of Facebook, because of the free Facebook. You didn't mean that, but the data less Facebook, that they can access Facebook without being charged to your phone. And so they saw value with the client and the candidate. So value in it, the operators saw the product. Oh, this can be something that can be used to convince or to help those who have not yet really decided their mind or go to vote for. That this can help augment our efforts. It seems like there's a shift in behavior. But I would say that if you were going to ask the candidate or the client himself, he would still very much prefer to move his resources into the triangle. But because they already accepted the change in behavior, that social media is here to stay. And if you really wanted to win, you might want to invest also on social media. And so they did. And I think that's one of our important contributions for this podcast. And Kat, you're a journalist. How do you deal with the fact that you have this kind of informant, but wants to remain anonymous? But how do you agree and negotiate those terms? Right, definitely, I think a lot of it comes with a sort of contract. That you come into this interview, I get to record it. But then I will also respect the parts that should be off the record. But once I start hitting record, yeah, that's my prerogative. And we're going to use that material. But if they want to hide their identity, we would of course want to respect that. And we would also want to respect the things that they would want to share. So I think as a journalist, there's always that human factor. And we're also building these relationships as well as getting information from people. So you'd want to maintain that. But at the same time, there's just that kind of respect that if they want me to remove some parts, I'll have to think about it first. Because once I hit record, the understanding is everything that's going to be in that is going to be in the podcast. Unless there's something we should not include. But that's of course the trust that I give to them. And that's trust they also give to me. But I think before we go to the conversation, let's give a bit of background about roles. Like, when did this actually start? Because I'm pretty sure it did not start with President Rodrigo Terté. The history of black campaigning is so much longer than 2016. And we need to kind of understand social media mobilization and troll armies as part of a longer history. And it's one among like a long recipe of things that one can do to attack your opponent, right? And so social media are important because these are channels that don't have very strong gatekeepers like editors, but to filter content. So here you're able to broadcast your content. You're able to see certain narratives that can spread very quickly, that can go viral very quickly. I guess what makes it different and correct me if I'm wrong. By 2016, it's become so institutionalized. Like, there is a system now. There is a network. Yeah, so I think in 2016, what was definitely still evident. And of course, I've been doing this research from 2016, 2019. And of course, with this election cycle, the amount of money poured into social media relative to other media, relative to TV, relative to radio and print. relative to grassroots campaigning. So that if you see this as a whole pie that you will need the air wars and also the ground wars. So air wars will refer to how you broadcast your message across multiple channels. Social media is just one component of the air wars. Usually most of the money will go to TV, but the duty of the campaign was unique in that they really leveraged social media and invests in that. And now you're correct to say that most of the money is moving from print, TV, also on-ground machinery in a pupunta as a social media. And I think that's got a lot to do with the context that we have obviously seen the impacts of social media campaigns, how narratives spread so easily online, but also the context of COVID and how campaigns had to mobilize quite early on even before the start of the official campaign season. It's just that it's just that it's a new build of networks, channels, influencers on social media. I understand at the time, we have a significant campaign TV. Running on elections, a campaign is not cheap, it's definitely not. It can go up to the nine digit mark if I may say so myself. We are above envy on the formal expanding. That's a close stock billion. So I'm interested though, actually, John said, if you could just indulge us, say what got you into the study? Why did you think of studying trolls? It's interesting you asked that the original study was actually supposed to be about content moderators. So if you recall the Baparanda Philippines is the global capital for content moderation. What does that mean? Content moderation refers to the type of worker who are the digital janitors, who scrub, filth, who scrub, hate speech, racist speech, even gory imagery, even porn, and dicked picks online. These are the people who scrub them off of our Facebook who try to protect ordinary users from seeing this kind of harassment and get and gory images online. So we were trying to get in touch with content moderators. It's hard to get in touch with content moderators. They have a lot of legal contracts that prohibit them from talking with researchers. But we had to pivot our own work to understand also a different class of workers, also very popular in the Philippines and working in a way very proximal to these content moderators, but we found that a really interesting paradox to think about how the Philippines on one hand is a center for content moderation, but it's also a center for troll armies. Okay, so 2016 you started this study, you published it in 2018, give us a background, paint is a picture of the sort of hierarchy, the network of this information, who's on top and who's at the bottom. Obviously, political clients have to interface with top level strategists, right? So these are people who are seasoned veterans in political campaigns and for the most part, and some of them come from backgrounds in advertising, public relations, and also media in journalism. It's the usual background of political marketers. This is the top tier. It's the top tier. Okay, the clients will often interface with them, and then the advertising and PR strategist, it's up to them to craft and mobilize their army, their team, right? So they see a lot of messages or brand of politicians, right? And so they will enlist digital influencers, so influencers are very popular micro celebrities on social media platforms, they have how many 200,000 followers or would count as a mega influencer, you know, a micro influencer would be 10,000 followers, right? And these influencers are, could be lifestyle influencers, could be mom bloggers, could be vloggers on YouTube, together with the category of influencer, but you can see the popular meme accounts, you know, the parody accounts, imagine because Senora Santibani's account, she's still on Facebook, please account, I would classify that as a parody account influencer, because millions are the followers of Senora on Facebook. Yeah, so that's a second tier, so that's a second tier, and then after that, what do we have? And the third tier, it's the community level fake account operators. So it don't fake account operators, it's the more copy-paste of the orientation, you know, the amplify and share information, they're also responsible for infiltrating closed communities, and that's why we use the term community level fake account operator, so they will infiltrate, you know, local Marikina News group, right? Or like Mami's of Iloilo Facebook group, and increasingly now, other messaging apps will have different kinds of teetas of green hills, for example. So some of them will be infiltrating these communities, and the job they are doing is to share their memes, their influencers, and that's the first comment, the negative comment, then in the pages of the Rappler or ABS CBN, so that's the community level fake account operator. And so that's the paid workers in a disinformation network. I would say that when we use the word troll, we often kind of imagine like the fake account operator, we imagine this person, possibly, you know, from a lower-class background, not very well-educated perhaps, might be a duterte supporter, might be a marco supporter, the paparang, you know, common imaginaries, not in a troll, but the research that we did interviewing how the work infrastructure actually looks like, the head troll isn't, you know, like a low-income person, this person operates from a very respectable corporate boardroom. They handle corporate accounts, usually, and also mix it up with political clients. So apparently can switch between a corporate account and a political client based on the season, and they use industry jargon and metrics, so they have a lot of like tools for advertising and PR to monitor reach and engagement. They're obviously well versed in the logics and strategies of branding. When we think of branding, we think of like values that we associate to certain corporate brands. I think of like Disney, for example, or Coca-Cola, the kinds of emotions, those brands evoke in you, and they transpose that kind of thinking to people, to politicians. They package politicians in a certain way. When comes to like troll work, what Danny does is he doesn't tell us that he's not technically creating these memes, but he is overseeing the creation of these memes, and he is also just a group counter-checking, kind of messaging that they'd want to have, but he did have this very interesting analogy, which is how the whole thing is being operated. There is the legal wife, and here the mistress. And so the mistress would do the dirty work, and we're being the B, the B-I-P-C-H. And because there was the legal wife, who would be doing all the doing the house, we're doing the pampang and all that, make the client, make the candidate vote worthy for the position again. So of course, you have good stories, you have good statements, like we would project assistance, and all of that, improving the infrastructure, etc. If you twist the truth, it's basically a lie, correct? I mean, it's plain and simple, sharing lies. One character that really struck me was this opponent was being portrayed as someone who plundered the resources of the city. When in fact, it was not as serious or as exaggerated as it relates. We're trying to portray the opponent as a criminal, as a plundered or someone who has violated human rights, not entirely false, but definitely out of truth. You are trading the real line of, you know, exaggerating versus outright lying, and building a castle towards lying, muds-linging, huh? Yeah, actually, I think this is pretty common, there's like an above ground and this underground campaign, one might call it a bifurcated strategy, and we're getting closer to that. Election parang on one hand, there's a candidate very positive lang yung gustun yung sabihin coming from his own mouth. He doesn't want to attack anyone or criticize anyone or answer anything negative, de ba? Challenging. Kaya hindi naman very challenging yung questions. But at the same time, other people are doing the attacks for him. This kind of bifurcated strategy. So ganun din pala yung nangyade in this particular case. Correct. So it was basically that so, of course, the hand like a manage, the hand like an obstacle. So all the hands were there, all the bosses were there. And the thing is that the client to go for a two-prong approach, you know, amplify my output, amplify what I have done for the past three years for the city, at the same time, attack the opponent. Imagine running two at the same time. It would really mean that you have a significant ability, it's very scary. So you tell us what to do. You want it that fast. And you know, it was not even a question of how much. It was a question of, so I would see results by the next meeting. You can get on. It's not even a question of, do we have budget for this? Because there is budget for that. There is money involved with that. There's some contractors, because we would liaise with some contractors on the content that we would work hand in hand with them. Since we were on the premises all the time. And so, like the resource we have, we have contractors and HR associates. We know the other teams, and there are not many staff writers. So they will share us their resource. When it's in the morning, and when it's in the afternoon, after lunch, I would go back to my cubicle, on ground zero, and do the work. Before meeting those close-door meetings, outside office, we would participate. We would listen in with the department heads of the city, and then what were the achievements of, then it all went wrong. You know, it doesn't sound like a troll fart. Because for me, I was not assigned to that. There was another person, because then it came in just for the creation of the names. You were content, that we would lift off from newspapers, and then we would twist it. And, you know, we would spin it in such a way that it would reflect negatively on the opponent. Basically, it's anyway. It's a concerted effort. One character that really struck to me was, this opponent was being portrayed as someone who plundered the resources of the city. When in fact, it was not as serious or as exaggerated as it really is. I mean, you know, we would lift off even like the old articles, or the changes from the internet, or from the newspapers, or the blogs. Now, whatever you know about us, we would reuse that content and then make a meme out of it that we would, you know, we would really twist it in such a way that it was exaggerated enough for people who see it on Facebook to like and share it. Even if it was so wild and outrageous, it would fall into, you know, people on Facebook, some people on Facebook, and it was specifically targeted, it was basically a self-targeted, because the parents would pay for ads. It would target ads from people who live in that city. It would be much easier for them. And Facebook ads are cheap, right? It's pretty expensive. If you know, compute it on a monthly or weekly basis, behind the Facebook ads. And so, you know, to that point, if they would really even pay for Facebook ads. There was an opportunity down the road, you know, there was Trump Street. There was okay, but I'll try to submit my resume. Then it was this PR firm who accepted my application and then we had a series of interviews and exams. I was asked to come back twice and then on the second part of the assessment, they asked me to visit a location which is not near me in office. And so I said, "Okay, see here, it's part of the interview process. I'll be okay. I understand." The engagement or the work was being presented to me that it was on a monthly basis and then I said, "What kind of an engagement apparently is this corporate PR or what?" Apart from its frappolitician, the compensation was quite competitive for a fresh graduate with an agency so may say. And so I accepted the engagement without knowing that there is this information going to be formed. But at that time, since I was fresh gadget, I was a pretty young, I didn't really have the power or energy to see or speak against or speak ill. But I just realized it one day that there's something going on because it doesn't feel right. And so it's not usually the case, Jonathan. It's not how we usually imagine these trolls. These are people who genuinely just wanted to go to advertising, just wanted to give PR a shot. And yet they got into this kind of work without actually knowing it, without realizing it. Like, how common is this? And not just in PR, 'cause you did interview someone who did not apply for an advertising job, but did get into a troll work. This time in the Senate. He tells more about that. Yeah, a lot of these trolls were in a way kind of forced to do this kind of work. Once they became part of legitimate and respectable, so-called respectable ad agencies. So, and that was on the case with Danny. In our study, we had also interviewed somebody who was a legislative staffer in the Senate for a politician. But at the same time, it was election season and everyone was expected to open fake accounts in the office. And it seems like the level of intimidation from the chief of staff is not the same. If you don't open a fake account on Facebook, so that kind of very aggressive, how can you say no? Right, like your boss to that chief of staff. Yeah, and let's listen to her interview here. We have her soundbite. So, when I joined, I joined this. I was recruited at 2017. But I officially joined this team. 2018, January 2018. So, it seems like it's leading. Although it's not a long time since 2019. The Senate staff had to help his sister-in-law. It seems like it's weird. It seems like it's not part of our job. But I spent four months in a long couple. And I was enrolled in ME, but I'm not allowed to go home. Because when I was a woman, I spent 24 hours. And I was able to resign because of that. I will not lie. My motivation is really money. I sometimes feel that there are a lot of people who doesn't deserve that money. Because I would say I work hard. You know, it was not easy emotionally. And physically, because I was really shocked. Basically, emotionally, it's not a joke. But there are a lot of people who doesn't even try to do good. And they're in public office. Because they're requirement. They're not meant for public office, such as the Senate, trust, and confidence in. Okay, I guess my question for you now, Jonathan is. It's an open secret. But why do you think it's so clandestine? Why do you think they wanted to hide it? Why do you think they can't even be honest about hiring these people? Is there a sort of stigma to it? In Bayon? I think the stigma still remains, Deba. And obviously, that journalistic investigations have really tried to unmask the troll. And some of these investigations really go after the low level operator. So again, by going after more vulnerable people, rather than people at the top. And I think people would obviously refuse that kind of stigma. And at the same time, for many of these PR firms, the term troll is also quite recent for them. But the actual work of political marketing, the actual work of consulting for clients, they've been doing this for many election cycles without that kind of stigma. But still with a level of secrecy. Still with a level of, we want to build relationships with our clients that will not compromise their strategy. Deba, apparently, there's still that level of secrecy in terms of how political clients would want to work with different kinds of groups as well. Yeah, some politicians are also very wisely make use of multiple operators. So they're not fully dependent on just one operator. And I think there's a level of trust and the right kind of distance that clients should cultivate with their consultants. Deba, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and just depend on one person for your entire strategy. If you have a chance and your entire campaign could also be torched. And it's interesting because even inside the institution, inside the network, they don't want to fully acknowledge what they're actually doing. Like, is that what you're trying to tell us? So in our work, Nobody call themselves a troll, niba. It's always somebody else that they attribute that label to. So there's always a capacity, the buck, kind of dynamic that happens. So even somebody who would have said that they crafted attack names or attack ads and used, you know, like very vulgar language in some of their posts, they will still say that somebody is worse and that's the real troll. So they will say, actually, the real supporters need to take care of the troll. I work all the time. That was the experience that Danny had. Just why when he did leave the troll office and he actually got a glimpse or got a taste of reality again, seeing his professor in one of the interviews. He couldn't show his face. Like, it was a sort of face-saving moment. And that must have triggered it. It doesn't do what Danny had to say about that. I enjoyed the night and when he were being, well, it's part of the job, the man that we're being asked sometimes because he had to blend in with the reporters, with the press, you know, with the press people. And then, and so I really thought the usual reporters would cover the meat. There was a time that the change of hands was like, there's an developmental journey with the meatballs. And this is a global image. It's not that I'm plastic, probably they have the reasons why I just didn't want to be a part of it. You know, that reporter, that's what he said. And then, you do up-ops work at the same time. When you see him right before your own eyes, that it's really happy. All the journalism ethics entered his school without the door. And you know, I don't want to be a part of it. Number two, for the chilling as it would be, when I saw my professor, I saw my college instructor, who still, you know, used to the journalist to this many days. That was one-on-one interview with my. Without a client. And then, you know, you're like, oh, that's right. You know, I don't want to be a part of it. I said, oh, that's right. I want to be a part of it. But the chilling effect, because you know, you're the one who made the use of college for years. And then, you know, that's right. You're doing the exact same thing that your teacher told you not to do. My college professor. I saw him dead in the eye. And then, looking at me, the person who was meeting you, oh, he was so disappointed. He was one of his students. And he was very surprised. So, it's impossible that he didn't know that. He said, oh, that's right. So, there's your freshman coming to the ceremony. And then, he said, really? So, what are we doing with my life? When I was doing the work, I was at the PRS on the internet. For me, it was in my mind, okay, okay, you have to put your feelings out of it. It's just a job, it's just a normal job. But, you know, the client is as long as the client is fine. You don't have to worry about it or you don't have to worry about it. So, for me, we're protected. We feel safe, but then again, as the elections drew closer and closer, we would notice more and more security with us. For us, it's slowly increasing security. And they are armed. And so, that must, I think, one of the turning points, is that it's getting dangerous. It's getting too dangerous. Or, I'm not comfortable with this level of danger anymore. I don't know if someone is following me when we get home. It's possible because, you know, in politics, everything is possible. Okay, so, what is truly worked? Why did Danny react that way? Is it as bad as he painted to be? Is it as unethical as we think it is? Although we do know it does sort of tread in that sort of unethical path, at the same time, Jonathan, you did mention that black propaganda, black campaigning has been here for so long. It's not exactly you. Yeah, so I think our intention for this episode, right, is to really hear from somebody, a former troll, a reform troll, however you might want to call Danny, right? This is a person who really struggled having to land a job, and obviously, fresh out of college, very eager to get into the industry of advertising, obviously very talented, as you hear, like he's super witty. But there are also kind of desperate, right? Like you can't be super choosy when you're at that level. And what we're trying to shade in here is that troll work is not a matter of good and evil. It's not a matter of us and them. There's so many gray areas that we need to kind of think about. And I think what we're trying to show here is how pervasive and normalize and unexpected, where the entry points are, where the boundaries are. And I think that's why we need to have like a more open conversation and also not always jump at that. Oh, we're going to stigmatize these particular people. And some of the investigations often target the low-level worker. But I think Danny's story is actually quite sympathetic. What do you think, Kat? Well, I think to him, at one point, he's working alone, but it's not a point that he's not working alone. And that's what got him out of it. And that's what I appreciate about this part that Danny shared to us. I think it's easy to be to plow your judgment when you're in that situation. Like what happened to me? And then he realized that the gravity of this situation or the consequences when I left. That was when it dawned that I might have done something wrong. I'm not really proud of him to be honest. And there are no such guys out there. It's okay to take your time to find the right to really, it's not a race. It's not just a race that you can't take. It's a race that you can't control. It's important, you know, you're not compromising on your values. After that, I took a break, again, to contemplate my life. And then I got a call from one of the companies that I applied to in Mahati. It must cooperate with them. I stayed there for quite a while until I left in 2019 to join the family business. I think it was just a timing because I joined the family business during the pandemic. So I don't really want to start the pandemic, because I joined the pandemic around January '28. I was wrapping up my affairs and corporate work and then the pandemic happened. Corporate come, but on the side, there was business development. For a professional services firm. So, definitely more legal, more clean, more professional. Since there was no cyber regulators involved, there was the SEC involved, BSP. You're really good at it, right? Yes, you're good at it. From the legitimate, the BIR. So from the legitimate, the very legitimate, I don't really regret anything. But, you know, even really re-examine your values. I think what I did, too. To start, you know, I'm sure that I'm in the family business right now. I have no regrets. If you tell me that, if I had to go back, I would. You know, just to explain it to me at all, because I think I would not be in a position where I'm right now. If I didn't go through that, I learned a lot from it. Yeah, but, you know, if I, you know, if I were on the other flip side, had they told me, had they been very transparent from the day one, I would not have probably accepted it. It just, I think, because it just, you know, quite a lot of things. It just happened that they did not present everything at once. In a way, Danny is still kind of privileged, right? Like, for him to quit his job after a couple of months, right? So imagine other people who are not like Danny and have to really depend on, yeah, like peanuts kind of salary, but still they have to cling to this. So should we not be more sympathetic to those who are in a more economically challenging position than Danny? Right. I wonder whether that story would trigger some sympathy or other kinds of judgment from our listeners. I would really love to hear from them. Yeah, we'd love to hear from them. Okay, so I guess one significant drag tag here is Danny didn't know who the client was. It wasn't clear. But at the same time, I think when Danny was starting to realize that this isn't just a regular copy, so time doing, it sounds like something else. Yeah, my first job out of college is actually as a media planner for a mechanics and advertising agency. And I remember in that interview, Sinabini Lesakhen, Con Sinomagi Gikong Client, and that was one of the key reasons why I signed up with them as opposed to another agency that was also trying to recruit me. And so I think it should be standard protocol for agencies to be fully transparent with applicants, especially at the last interview, right? So that's the story of Danny. That's what I'm talking about. That's the first day of the job. So I would anyway be even more okay if I didn't interview him. ni alam. Pero at least dung sa last interview, dapat ng sabi ng muna sa kanya. So I do think that there is a level of deception here and Danny's story is not unique. In our research and architects of network this info, we talked to 20 folks in that hierarchy, deba palang strategist, influencers and take-up operator. So hindi unique your story na o ang client kopala, or ang job kopala is actually to do attack memes on social media. What's interesting about this is it's coming from both sides, like you can't actually fault the candidate as well. And again, I'm not making a case for them, but just you know how it works. You know how this campaign is going to be, if they're going to be throwing mud at you, you might as well do the same. Because that's how it was here in Danny's case, and as he explains it to us now that the other side, the opponent also had the same team more than this. So it was them against, if they were fitted against each other and they were just throwing her thing mud at everyone's expense on Facebook. Yeah, and remember this is a local campaign. So yeah, so this is for a city mayor race. So we do meet a lot at that level and can you say there's like a professional troll and an unprofessional troll to this? That's a good question. So political fans are being activated by the paid operators, right? So in the hierarchy of people who are being paid in the disinformation architecture, their job is to provide the narratives, to provide the content of what people will be talking about, what ordinary people will be talking about, and what real political fans will talk about. But obviously, they will depend on the real fans who are supporters of their clients, to play with those names, to play with those narratives, to add to the conspiracy. So there's a creativity and a community in being a troll. But you feel like you belong to this group of supporters. And you're also trying to impress each other in terms of how far can you take like one conspiracy theory or how much vulgar you can craft like a meme or how funny or satirical. You can interpret some of the stories. And of course, Pinoy's are super great with satire and parody. And I think it's like comedy bar kind of culture. It's like we've seen it online in terms of how valuable the language that you will see online. And also how witty. We're nearing the end of this podcast. And what we're understanding now, what we saw now from Danny and from Jonathan's work is that, yeah, troll work. It's not as simple as it sounds. It can be complicated. But at the end of the day, everyone else can become a troll as well. So I guess we're heading to the next tier, which is the influencers because you could be a troll. You could create all of these clever memes. But now when it comes to reach, how far and how much people can you actually reach with this kind of campaign with this kind of propaganda. In our next episode, as we step up the tier of this network of disinformation, we talk to someone else. We talk to an influencer. So influencers are micro celebrities and social media with thousands of followers, maybe even millions of followers. And increasingly, they're developing formal collaborations with politicians. And they're developing cloud. They're using their own popularity to boost the campaigns of politicians. Because how lucrative is it for them? What are the potential risks for their own reputation and for their own image? So we'll be talking with someone who has vast experience, both managing groups of influencers and being a TikTok influencer himself. So stay tuned to that episode. Again, I'm Kat Ventura, a journalist and an executive producer of Buma Podcast.